What Labels Do & A Bunch of Other Things.

Spent most of the day researching record stores, webzines, & distributors for eastern Europe.  Found about 100 new contacts.  It takes a lot longer to navigate a website & evaluate its appropriateness to Silber when you can’t read the language.

I made a tentative order for the comic anthology I’m helping put together for SPACE.  It’s going to be over 100 pages, digital only, & free.

Talked with Melissa Gardner about the next XO script & she seems pretty stoked about the idea of drawing not so many cars as I’ve been making her do lately.  I still need to write the script but the basic plot is: “Why did XO start living a monastic lifestyle?”

Did a couple hours of reading on the “future of monetizing music.”  It’s interesting to see the quantity of people that believe musicians should be their own marketing people & that labels are obsolete.  I think there’s a real lack of understanding of what the job of a label is in the case of a label like Silber.  I really like to work hands on with the artists on the label & I feel like my job is to challenge a band to put out the best record they can (I’m sometimes accused of micro-managing when I tell someone that their album has a song missing or isn’t loud enough or they need to buy a new reverb pedal or they need to edit out a vocal pop at 01:32 in track 4).  Of course most bands I know who aren’t on Silber have promo campaigns of literally ten discs mailed out for press & radio, some make it all the way up to fifty.  That’s fine, those are probably natural numbers to people not working promotions on a regular basis, meanwhile I’m sending out 200 discs & digital downloads to about 2500 other radio/press folks.  So if the 1000 true fans model (the idea of selling $40 of merchandise (CDs, downloads, t-shirts, concert tickets) each year) is right & it needs to be 2000 because the band is splitting earning with me, I like to think that they have a better chance of reaching 2000 with me than 1000 without me.  We’ll see what the future holds.

I checked out that site that shows website popularity & Silber is around 1,500,000.  I’m wanting to try to break into the 6 digit range by the end of the year.  I’m not sure if I can make it happen or not, we’ll see.

So since this is turning into a long post that might get some comments, I have a website question.  When it comes to audio samples, do you prefer an embedded player or a link that opens in your own player or a link to download?  I’ve been running it for years now that it opens in your own player (because that used to be the easiest thing for people to use), but I’m not sure if this is what people want these days.  Let me know what you think.

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